RIC announces $28 million in improvements

When the economy comes back, Richmond International Airport plans to be ready to handle the increase in air traffic.

The Capital Region Airport Commission is planning more than $28 million of airfield improvements over the next two years at RIC.

"We're laying the groundwork for the anticipated growth that the airport will experience coming out of this recession," said Jon Mathiasen, the commission's president and chief executive officer, "which we hope is sooner than later."

Using federal and state airport improvement grants, the projects at Richmond International in eastern Henrico County announced yesterday will include:

By "this time next year, we'll be ahead of the capital [investment] curve," Mathiasen said. "For the first time in many, many years . . . we'll have some surplus parking and gate space for the airlines."

When airports seek additional airline service, he explained, "you have to have excess capacity to grow into. It takes years to put this in place, and we don't want to miss these opportunities."

The airport commission reported yesterday that passenger traffic at RIC decreased 7.4 percent in January compared with a year ago, from 255,950 in January 2008 to 237,117 last month.

"People have just cut travel," said Troy Bell, the airport's marketing and air-service development director. "Businesses have become a little more conservative with travel expenditures."

Only two airlines saw local traffic increase in January over the same month last year, Bell said -- JetBlue Airways, up 7.2 percent, and United Airlines, up 6.2 percent.

The airport commission anticipates that the recession will depress passenger traffic, the heart of RIC's business, for at least two years before travel starts to grow again at about 5 percent annually.

Traffic in 2008 was down 4 percent last year, to 3.5 million passengers, with the year-over-year falloff beginning in April after 34 months of record growth.

Contact Peter Bacqué at (804) 649-6813 or .